"Story? who the fuck cares about story? We put peoples balls into a vicegrip, and they asked for more. repeatedly."

If you gain joy out of souls-likes, that's fine. No judgement. But for me, the payoff isn't there.

You spend your time smashing your face into a wall to learn a boss' patterns, just to get a disjointed fragment of a story. 3/4ths of the story isn't revealed to you in the game through any means, requires reading a wiki, and watching a 3 hour youtube video essay to make any-fucking-sense of it.

The only attraction is the difficulty, and I'm not enough of a try-hard to put in the effort.

@da_667 I feel very similar, I like a lot more story in my games than I found in ER (I hadn’t played any of the DS games). It did a good job at showing things that really made me want to know the story behind them, but then there just wasn’t much at all actually there.